Zhou Enlai

Zhou Enlai 周恩来
1st Premier of the People's Republic of China
In office 1 October 1949 – 8 January 1976 (26 years, 99 days)
President	Mao Zedong Liu Shaoqi
Deputy	Dong Biwu Chen Yun Lin Biao Deng Xiaoping
Leader	Mao Zedong (Chairman of the Communist Party of China)
Succeeded by	Hua Guofeng
Member of the National People's Congress
In office 15 September 1954 – 8 January 1976
Constituency	Beijing At-large
1st Foreign Minister of the PRC
In office 1949–1958
Preceded by	None
Succeeded by	Chen Yi
2nd Chairperson of the CPPCC
In office December 1954 – 8 January 1976
Preceded by	Mao Zedong
Succeeded by	vacant (1976–1978) Deng Xiaoping
Personal details
Born	(1898-03-05)5 March 1898 Huai'an, Jiangsu, Qing Dynasty
Died	8 January 1976(1976-01-08) (aged 77) Beijing, People's Republic of China
Nationality	Chinese
Political party	Communist Party of China
Spouse	Deng Yingchao
Signature
Military service
Battles/wars	Eastern Expeditions Nanchang Uprising Encirclement Campaigns Second Sino-Japanese War Chinese Civil War

Zhou Enlai
Simplified Chinese	周恩来
Traditional Chinese	周恩來
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Zhōu Ēnlái Wade–Giles Chou En-lai

Zhou Enlai (pinyin: Zhōu Ēnlái; Wade-Giles: Chou En-lai; IPA: [ʈʂóʊ ə́nlǎɪ]; 5 March 1898 – 8 January 1976) was the first Premier of the People's Republic of China, serving from October 1949 until his death in January 1976. Zhou was instrumental in the Communist Party's rise to power, and subsequently in the development of the Chinese economy and the restructuring of Chinese society.

A skilled and able diplomat, Zhou served as the Chinese foreign minister from 1949 to 1958. Advocating peaceful coexistence with the West, he participated in the 1954 Geneva Conference and helped orchestrate Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China. Due to his expertise, Zhou was largely able to survive the purges of high-level Chinese Communist Party officials during the Cultural Revolution. His attempts at mitigating the Red Guards' damage and his efforts to protect others from their wrath made him immensely popular in the Revolution's later stages.

As Mao Zedong's health began to decline in 1971 and 1972, Zhou and the Gang of Four struggled internally over leadership of China. Zhou's health was also failing, however, and he died eight months before Mao on 8 January 1976. The massive public outpouring of grief in Beijing turned to anger towards the Gang of Four, leading to the Tiananmen Incident. Although succeeded by Hua Guofeng, it was Deng Xiaoping, Zhou's ally, who was able to outmaneuver the Gang of Four politically and eventually take Mao's place as Paramount leader by 1977.

Early life

Youth

Zhou Enlai was born in Huai'an, Jiangsu province on 5 March 1898, the first son of his branch of the Zhou family. The Zhou family were originally from Shaoxing in Zhejiang province. During the late Qing dynasty, Shaoxing was famous as the home of families such as Zhou's, whose members worked as government "clerks" (shiye) generation after generation. To move up the ladder in civil service, the men in these families often had to get transferred, and in the late years of the Qing dynasty, Zhou Enlai's branch of the family moved to Huai'an. Even after the move, however, the family continued to view Shaoxing as its ancestral home.

Zhou's grandfather, Zhou Panlong, and his granduncle, Zhou Jun'ang, were the first members of the family to move to Huai'an. Panlong apparently passed the provincial examinations, and Zhou Enlai later claimed that Panlong served as magistrate governing Huai'an county. Zhou's father, Zhou Yineng, was the second of Zhou Panlong's four sons. Zhou's birth mother, surnamed Wan, was the daughter of a prominent Jiangsu official.

Like many others, the economic fortunes of Zhou's large family of scholar-officials were decimated by a great economic recession that China suffered in the late nineteenth century. Zhou Yineng had a reputation for honesty, gentleness, intelligence, and concern for others, but was also considered "weak" and "lacking in discipline and determination." He was unsuccessful in his personal life, and drifted across China doing various occupations, working in Beijing, Shandong, Anhui, Shenyang, Inner Mongolia, and Sichuan. Zhou Enlai later remembered his father as being always away from home and generally unable to support his family.

Soon after birth, Zhou Enlai was adopted by his father's youngest brother, Zhou Yigan, who was ill with tuberculosis. Apparently the adoption was arranged because the family feared Yigan would die without an heir. Zhou Yigan died soon after the adoption, and Zhou Enlai was raised by Yigan's widow, whose surname was Chen. Madame Chen was also from a scholarly family and received a traditional literary education. According to Zhou's own account, he was very close to his adoptive mother and acquired his lasting interest in Chinese literature and opera from her. Madame Chen taught Zhou to read and write at an early age, and Zhou later claimed to have read the famous vernacular novel Xiyouji at the age of six. By the age of eight, he was reading other traditional Chinese novels, including the Water Margin, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and Dream of the Red Mansion.

Zhou's birth mother Wan died in 1907 when Zhou was 9, and his adoptive mother Chen in 1908 when Zhou was 10. Zhou's father was working in Hubei, far from Jiangsu, so Zhou and his two younger brothers returned to Huai'an and lived with his father's remaining younger brother Yikui for the next two years. In 1910, Zhou's uncle Yigeng, his father's older brother, offered to care for Zhou. The family in Huai'an agreed, and Zhou was sent to stay with his uncle in Manchuria at Shenyang, where Zhou Yigeng worked in a government office.

Education

In Shenyang, Zhou attended the Dongguan Model Academy, a Western style school. His previous education consisted entirely of home schooling. In addition to new subjects such as English and science, Zhou was also exposed to the writings of reformers and radicals such as Liang Qichao, Kang Youwei, Chen Tianhua, Zou Rong and Zhang Binglin. At the age of fourteen, Zhou declared that his motivation for pursuing education was to "become a great man who will take up the heavy responsibilities of the country in the future." In 1913, Zhou's uncle was transferred to Tianjin, where Zhou entered the famous Nankai Middle School.

Nankai Middle School was founded by Yan Xiu, a prominent scholar and philanthropist, and headed by Zhang Boling, one of the most important Chinese educators of the twentieth century. Nankai's teaching methods were unusual by contemporary Chinese standards. By the time Zhou began attending, it had adopted the educational model used at Phillips academy in the United States. The school's reputation, with its "highly disciplined" daily routine and "strict moral code" attracted many students who later became prominent in public life. Zhou's friends and classmates there ranged from Ma Jun (an early communist leader executed in 1927) to K. C. Wu (later mayor of Shanghai and governor of Taiwan under the Nationalist party). Zhou's talents also attracted the attention of Yan Xiu and Zhang Boling. Yan in particular thought highly of Zhou, helping to pay for his studies in Japan and later France.

Yan was so impressed with Zhou that he encouraged Zhou to marry his daughter, but Zhou declined. Zhou later expressed the reasons to his decision not to marry Yan's daughter to his classmate, Zhang Honghao. Zhou said that he declined the marriage because he feared that his financial prospects would not be promising, and that Yan would, as his father-in-law, later dominate his life.

Zhou did well in his studies at Nankai; he excelled in Chinese, won several awards in the school speech club, and became editor of the school newspaper in his final year. Zhou was also very active in acting and producing dramas and plays at Nankai; many students who were not otherwise acquainted with him knew of him through his acting. Nankai preserves a number of essays and articles written by Zhou at this time, and these reflect the discipline, training, and concern for country that Nankai's founders attempted to instill in their students. At the school's tenth commencement in June 1917, Zhou was one of five graduating students honored at the ceremony, and one of the two valedictorians.

By the time that he graduated from Nankai, the institution had mad a deep impression on him. Zhang Bolin's teachings of gong (public spirit) and neng (ability) had made a great impression on him. His participation in debates and stage performances contributed to his eloquence and skills of persuasion. Zhou left Nankai with a great desire to pursue public service, and to acquire the skills required to do so.

Following many of his classmates, Zhou went to Japan in July 1917 for further studies. During his two years in Japan, Zhou spent most of his time in the East Asian Higher Preparatory School, a language school for Chinese students. Zhou's studies were supported by his uncles, and apparently Nankai founder Yan Xiu as well, but their funds were limited and during this period Japan suffered from severe inflation. Zhou originally planned on winning one of the scholarships offered by the Chinese government; these scholarships, however, required Chinese students to pass entrance examinations in Japanese universities. Zhou took entrance examinations for at least two schools, but failed to gain admission,. Zhou's reported anxieties were compounded by the death of his uncle, Zhou Yikui, an inability to master Japanese, and an acute Japanese cultural chauvinism that discriminated against Chinese. By the time that Zhou returned to China in the spring of 1919, he had become deeply disenchanted with Japanese culture, rejecting the idea that the Japanese political model was relevant to China and disdaining the values of elitism and militarism that he observed.

Some of Zhou's diaries and letters from Japan still exist; together with memoirs of his acquaintances, these give a sketch of Zhou's political development at this point. It seems that he devoted most of his time to learning Japanese and reading; his personal relations were mostly limited to classmates from Nankai who had come to Japan; at one point he was deputy secretary of the Nankai alumni association in Japan.

Zhou's diaries and letters from his time in Tokyo show that Zhou was also deeply interested in politics and current events. In particular, he was fascinated by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Bolsheviks' new policies. He began to read avidly Chen Duxiu's progressive and left-leaning magazine, New Youth. He probably read some early Japanese works on Marx, and it has been claimed that he even attended Kawakami Hajime's lectures at Kyoto University. Kawakami was an important figure in the early history of Japanese Marxism, and his translations and articles influenced a generation of Chinese communists. However, it now seems very unlikely that Zhou met him or heard any of his lectures. Zhou's diaries also show his concern over Chinese student strikes in Japan in May 1918, when the Chinese government failed to send the students' scholarships, but he apparently was not deeply involved in the protest. His active role in political movements began after his return to China.

Early political activities

A young Zhou Enlai (1919)

Zhou returned to Tianjin sometime in the spring of 1919. Historians disagree over Zhou's participation in the May Fourth Movement (May to June 1919). Some scholars believe that Zhou was the "leader of the Tianjin student protests in the May Fourth movement", but many modern scholars believe that it is highly unlikely that Zhou participated at all, based on the total lack of direct evidence among the surviving records from the period. On July 1919, however, Zhou became editor of the Tianjin Student Union Bulletin, apparently at the request of his Nankai classmate, Ma Jun, a founder of the Union. During its brief existence from July 1919 to early 1920, the Bulletin was widely read by student groups around the country and suppressed on at least one occasion by the national government as "harmful to public safety and social order."

When Nankai became a university in August 1919, Zhou was in the first class, but he was an activist full time. His political activities continued to expand, and in September he and several other students agreed to establish the "Awakening Society", a small group never numbering more than 25. In explaining the goals and purpose of the Awakening Society, Zhou declared that "anything that is incompatible with progress in current times, such as militarism, the bourgeoisie, partylords, bureaucrats, inequality between men and women, obstinate ideas, obsolete morals, old ethics... should be abolished or reformed", and affirmed that it was the purpose of the Society to spread this awareness among the Chinese people. It was in this society that Zhou first met his future wife, Deng Yingchao. In some ways, the Awakening Society resembled the clandestine Marxist study group at Peking University headed by Li Dazhao, with the group members using numbers instead of names for "secrecy." (Zhou was "Number Five," a pseudonym which he continued to use in later years.) Indeed, immediately after the group was established, it invited Li Dazhao to give a lecture on Marxism.

Zhou assumed more prominent active role in political activities over the next few months. The largest of these activities were rallies in support of a nation-wide boycott of Japanese goods. As the boycott became more effective, the national government, under pressure from Japan, attempted to suppress it. On 23 January 1920, a confrontation over boycott activities in Tianjin led to the arrest of a number of people, including several Awakening Society members, and on 29 January Zhou led a march on the Governor's Office in Tianjin to present a petition calling for the arrestees' release. Zhou and three other leaders were themselves arrested. The arrestees were held for over six months; during their detention, Zhou supposedly organized discussions on Marxism. At their trial in July, Zhou and six others were sentenced to two months; the rest were found not guilty. All were immediately released since they had already been held over six months.

After Zhou's release, he and the Awakening Society met with several Beijing organizations and agreed to form a "Reform Federation"; during these activities Zhou became more familiar with Li Dazhao and met Zhang Shenfu, who was the contact between Li in Beijing and Chen Duxiu in Shanghai. Both men were organizing underground Communist cells in cooperation with Grigori Voitinsky, a Comintern agent, but Zhou apparently did not meet Voitinsky at this point.

Soon after his release, Zhou decided to go to Europe to study. (He was expelled from Nankai University during his detention.) Although money was a problem, he received a scholarship from Yan Xiu. In order to gain greater funding, he successfully approached a Tianjin newspaper, Yishi bao, for work as "special correspondent" in Europe. Zhou left Shanghai for Europe on 7 November 1920 with a group of 196 work study students, including friends from Nankai and Tianjin.

Zhou's experiences after the May Fourth incident seem to have been crucial in his radicalization. Zhou's friends in the Awakening Society were similarly affected. 15 of the group's members became Communists for at least some time, and the group remained close later on. Zhou and six other group members wound up going to Europe in the next two years, and Zhou eventually married the group's youngest member, Deng Yingchao.

European activities

Zhou's group arrived in Marseilles 13 December. Unlike most other Chinese students, who traveled to Europe on work-study programs, Zhou's scholarship and position with Yishi bao meant that he was well provided for and did not have to do any work while during his stay. Because of his financial position, he was able to devote himself full-time to revolutionary activities. In a letter to his cousin in January 30, 1921, Zhou said that his goals in Europe were to discover the social conditions in foreign countries and their methods of resolving social issues, for the purpose of later applying these lessons to China after his return. In the same letter he told his cousin that, regarding his adoption of a specific ideology, "I still have to make up my mind."

While in Europe, Zhou studied the differing approaches to resolving class conflict adopted by various European nations. In London on January 1929, Zhou witnessed a large miners' strike and wrote a series of articles for the Yishi bao (generally sympathetic to the miners) examining the conflict between workers and employers, and the conflict's resolution. After five weeks in London he moved to Paris, where interest in Russia's 1917 October Revolution was high. In a letter to his cousin, Zhou identified two broad paths of reform for China: "gradual reform" (as in England) or "violent means" (as in Russia). Zhou wrote that "I do not have a preference for either the Russian or the British way... I would prefer something in-between, rather than one of these two extremes."

Still interested in academic programs, Zhou traveled to Britain in January 1921 to visit Edinburgh University. Concerned by financial problems and language requirements, he did not enroll, returning to France at the end of January. There are no records of Zhou entering any academic program in France. In spring 1921, he joined a Chinese Communist cell. Zhou was recruited by Zhang Shenfu, whom he had met in August of the previous year in connection with Li Dazhao. He also knew Zhang through Zhang's wife, Liu Qingyang, a member of the Awakening Society. Zhou has sometimes been portrayed at this time as uncertain in his politics, but his swift move to Communism suggests otherwise.

The cell Zhou belonged to was based in Paris; in addition to Zhou, Zhang, and Liu it included two other students, Zhao Shiyan and Chen Gongpei. Over the next several months, this group eventually formed a united organization with a group of Chinese radicals from Hunan, who were living in Montargis south of Paris. This group included such later prominent figures as Cai Hesen, Li Lisan, Chen Yi, Nie Rongzhen, Deng Xiaoping, and also Guo Longzhen, another member of the Awakening Society. Unlike Zhou, most of the students in this group were participants in the work-study program. A series of conflicts with the Chinese administrators of the program over low pay and poor working conditions resulted in over a hundred students occupying the program's offices at the Sino-French Institute in Lyon in September 1921. The students, including several people from the Montargis group, were arrested and deported. Zhou was apparently not one of the occupying students and remained in France until February or March, 1922, when he moved with Zhang and Liu from Paris to Berlin. Zhou's move to Berlin was perhaps because the relatively "lenient" political atmosphere in Berlin made it more favorable as a base for overall European organizing. In addition, the Western European Secretariat of the Comintern was located in Berlin and it is clear that Zhou had important Comintern connections, though the nature of these is disputed. After moving operations to Germany, Zhou regularly shuttled between Paris and Berlin.

Zhou returned to Paris by June 1922, where he was one of the twenty two participants present at the organization of the Chinese Youth Communist Party, established as the European Branch of the Chinese Communist Party. Zhou helped draft the party's charter and was elected to the three member executive committee as director of propaganda. He also wrote for and helped edit the party magazine, Shaonian (Youth), later renamed Chiguang (Red Light). It was in Zhou's capacity as general editor of this magazine that Zhou first met Denx Xiaoping, only seventeen years old, who Zhou hired to operate a mimeograph (copy) machine. The party went through several reorganizations and name changes, but Zhou remained a key member of the group throughout his stay in Europe. Other important activities Zhou undertook included recruiting and transporting students for the University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow, and the establishment of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) European branch.

In June 1923, the Third Congress of the Chinese Communist Party accepted the Comintern's instructions to ally with the KMT, led at the time by Sun Yat-sen. These instructions called for CCP members to join the Nationalist Party as "individuals", while still retaining their association with the CCP. After joining the CCP, they would work to lead and direct it, transforming it into a vehicle of revolution. Within several years, this strategy would become the source of serious conflict between the KMT and the CCP.

Zhou not only joined the KMT, but actually helped organize the founding of the Nationalist Party European branch in November 1923. Under Zhou's influence, most of the European branch's officers were in fact communists. Zhou's wide ranging contacts and personal relationships formed during this period were central to his career. Important party leaders, such as Zhu De and Nie Rongzhen, were first admitted to the party by Zhou.

By 1924, the Soviet-Nationalist alliance was expanding rapidly and Zhou was summoned back to China for further work. He left Europe probably in late July 1924, returning to China as one of the most senior Chinese Communist Party members in Europe.

Political and military work in Whampoa

In Whampoa Military Academy as Director of the political department.

Establishment in Guangzhou

Zhou returned to China in late August or early September 1924 to join the Political Department of the Whampoa Military Academy, probably through the influence of Zhang Shenfu, who had previously worked there. The exact positions Zhou held at Whampoa and the dates he held them are not clear. A few months after his arrival, possibly October 1924, he became deputy director of the Academy's Political Department, and later, possibly November 1924, director of the department. Even though it was technically responsible to the central government, Zhou's political department operated under a direct mandate to indoctrinate Whampoa's cadets in the ideology of the KMT for the purpose of improving loyalty and morale. While he was serving in Whampoa, Zhou was also made the secretary of the Communist Party of Guandong-Guanxi, and served as the CCP representative with the rank of major-general.

The island of Whampoa, ten miles downriver from Guangzhou, was at the heart of the Soviet-Nationalist Party alliance. Conceived as the training center of the Nationalist Party Army, it was to provide the military base from which the Nationalists would launch their campaign to unify China, which was split into dozens of military satrapies. From its beginning, the school was funded, armed, and partly staffed by the Soviets.

The Political Department, where Zhou worked, was responsible for political indoctrination and control. As a result, Zhou was a prominent figure at most Academy meetings, often addressing the school immediately after commandant Chiang Kai-shek. He was extremely influential in establishing the political department/party representative (commissar) system which was adopted in Nationalist armed forces in 1925.

Concurrent with his Whampoa appointment, Zhou became secretary of the Communist Party's Guangdong Provincial Committee, and at some point a member of the Provincial Committee's Military Section. Zhou vigorously extended Communist influence at the Academy. He soon arranged for a number of other prominent Communists to join the Political Department, including Chen Yi, Nie Rongzhen, Yun Daiying, and Xiong Xiong. Zhou played an important role in establishing the Young Soldiers Association, a youth group which was dominated by the Communists, and Sparks, a short-lived Communist front group. He thus recruited numerous new Communist party members from cadet ranks, and eventually set up a covert Communist Party branch at the academy to direct the new members. When Nationalists concerned with the increasing number of Communist members and organizations at Whampoa set up a "Society for Sun Yatsenism," Zhou attempted to squelch it; the conflict between these student groups set the background for Zhou's removal from the academy.

Military activities

Zhou participated in two military operations conducted by the Nationalist regime in 1925, later known as the first and second Eastern Expeditions. The first was in January 1925 when Chen Jiongming, an important Cantonese military leader previously driven out of Guangzhou by Sun Yat-sen, attempted to retake Guangzhou. The Nationalist regime's campaign against Chen consisted of forces from the Guangdong Army under Xu Chongzhi, and two training regiments of the Nationalist Party Army, led by Chiang Kai-shek and staffed by Academy officers and cadets. The fighting lasted through May 1925, with the defeat, but not destruction, of Chen's forces. Zhou accompanied the Whampoa cadets on the expedition as a political officer.

When Chen regrouped and attacked Guangzhou again in September 1925, the Nationalists launched a second expedition. Nationalist forces by this time had been reorganized into five corps (or armies), and adopted the commissar system with Political Departments and Nationalist party representatives in most divisions. The First Corps, made up of the Nationalist Party Army, was led by Whampoa graduates and commanded by Chiang Kai-shek, who personally appointed Zhou director of the First Corps Political Department. Soon after, the Nationalist Party's Central Executive Committee appointed Zhou Nationalist Party party representative, making Zhou chief commissar of the First Corps. The first major battle of expedition saw the capture of Chen's base in Huizhou on 15 October. Shantou was taken on 6 November, and by the end of 1925, the Nationalists controlled all of Guangdong province.

Zhou's appointment as chief commissar of the First Corps allowed him to appoint Communists as commissars in four of the Corps' five divisions. Following the conclusion of the Expedition, Zhou was appointed special commissioner for the East River District, which placed him in temporary administrative control of several counties; he apparently used this opportunity to establish a Communist party branch in Shantou and strengthen the CPC's control of local unions. This marked the high point of Zhou's time at Whampoa.

Political activities

In personal terms, 1925 was also an important year for Zhou. Zhou had kept in touch with Deng Yingchao, who he had met in the Awakening Society while in Tianjin; and, in January 1925, Zhou asked for and received permission from CCP authorities to marry Deng. The two married in Guangzhou on August 8, 1925.

Zhou's work at Whampoa came to an end with the Zhongshan Warship Incident of March 20, 1926, in which a gunboat with a mostly Communist crew moved from Whampoa to Guangzhou without Chiang's knowledge or approval. This event led to Chiang's exclusion of Communists from the Academy by May, 1926, and the removal of numerous Communists from high positions in the Nationalist Party. In his memoirs, Nie Rongzhen suggested that the gunboat had moved in protest of Zhou Enlai's (brief) arrest.

Zhou's time in Whampoa was a significant period in his career. His pioneering work as a political officer in the military made him an important Communist Party expert in this key area; much of his later career centered in the military. Zhou's work in the CCP Guangdong Regional Committee Military Section was typical of his covert activities in the period. The Section was a secret group consisting of three members of the Provincial Central Committee, and was first responsible for organizing and directing CCP nuclei in the army itself. These nuclei, organized at the regimental level and above, were "illegal," meaning they were formed without Nationalist knowledge or authorization. The Section was also responsible for organizing similar nuclei in other armed groups, including secret societies and key services such as railroads and waterways. Zhou did extensive work in these areas until the final separation of the Nationalist and Communist parties and the end of the Soviet-Nationalist alliance in 1927.

The Nationalist-Communist split

Extent of cooperation

Zhou's activities immediately after his removal from his positions at Whampoa are uncertain. An earlier biographer claims that Chiang Kai-shek put Zhou in charge of "an advanced training center for the CCP members and commissars withdrawn from the army." More recent Chinese Communist sources claim that Zhou had an important role at this time in securing Communist control of Ye Ting's Independent Regiment. The regiment and Ye Ting later played a leading role in the Communist's first major military action, the Nanchang Revolt.

In July 1926, the Nationalists began the Northern Expedition, a massive military attempt to unify China. The Expedition was led by Chiang Kai-shek and the National Revolutionary Army (NRA), an amalgam of earlier military forces with significant guidance from Russian military advisors and numerous Communists as both commanding and political officers. With the early successes of the Expedition, there was soon a race between Chiang Kai-shek leading the "right-wing" of the Nationalist Party and the Communists, running inside the "left-wing" of the Nationalists, for control of major southern cities such as Nanjing and Shanghai. At this point the Chinese portion of Shanghai was controlled by Sun Chuanfang, one of the militarists targeted by the North Expedition. Distracted by fighting with the NRA and defections from his army, Sun reduced his forces in Shanghai, and the Communists, whose party headquarters was located in Shanghai, made three attempts to seize control of the city, later called "the three Shanghai Uprisings", in October 1926, February 1927, and March 1927.

Activities in Shanghai

Zhou was transferred to Shanghai to assist in these activities, probably in late 1926. It seems he was not present for the first uprising on 23–24 Oct, but he was certainly in Shanghai by December 1926. Early accounts credit Zhou with labor organizing activities in Shanghai after his arrival, or, more credibly, working to "strengthen the indoctrination of political workers in labor unions and smuggle arms for the strikers." Reports that Zhou "organized" or "ordered" the second and third uprisings on 20 February and 21 March exaggerate his role. Major decisions during this period were made by the Communist head in Shanghai, Chen Duxiu, the Party's general secretary, with a special committee of eight party officials coordinating Communist actions. The committee also consulted closely on decisions with the Comintern representatives in Shanghai, headed by Grigori Voitinsky. The partial documentation available for this period shows that Zhou headed the Communist Party Central Committee's Military Commission in Shanghai. He participated in both the February and March actions, but was not the guiding hand in either event, instead working with A. P. Appen, the Soviet military advisor to the Central Committee, training the pickets of the General Labor Union, the Communist controlled labor organization in Shanghai. He also worked to make union strong arm squads more effective when the Communists declared a "Red Terror" after the failed February uprising; this action resulted in the murder of twenty "anti-union" figures, and the kidnapping, beating, and intimidation of others associated with anti-union activities.

The third Communist uprising in Shanghai took place from March 20–21. 600,000 rioting workers cut power and telephone lines and seized the city's post office, police headquarters, and railway stations, often after heavy fighting. During this uprising, the insurrectionists were under strict orders not to harm foreigners, which they obeyed. The forces of Sun Chuanfang withdrew and uprising was successful, despite the small number of armed forces available. The first Nationalist troops entered the city the next day.

As the Communists attempted to install a soviet municipal government, conflict began between the Nationalists and Communists, and on 12 April Nationalist forces, including both members of the Green Gang and soldiers under the command of Nationalist general Bai Chongxi attacked the Communists and quickly overcame them. On the eve of the Nationalist attack, Wang Shouhua, who was both the head of the CCP Labour Committee and the Chairman of the General Labour Committee, accepted a dinner invitation from "Big-eared Du" (a Shanghai gangster) and was strangled after he arrived. Zhou himself was nearly killed in a similar trap, when he was arrested after arriving at a dinner held at the headquarters of Si Lie, a Nationalist commander of Chiang's Twenty-sixth Army. Despite rumors that Chiang had put a high price on Zhou's head, he was quickly released by Bai Chongxi's forces. The reasons for Zhou's sudden release may have been that Zhou was then the most senior Communist in Shanghai, that Chiang's efforts to exterminate the Shanghai Communists were highly secretive at the time, and that his execution would have been noticed as a violation of the cooperation agreement between the CCP and the KMT (which was technically still in effect). Zhou was finally only released after the intervention of a representative of the Twenty-sixth Army, Zhao Shu, who was able to convince his commanders that the arrest of Zhou had been a mistake.

Flight from Shanghai

Fleeing Shanghai, Zhou made his way to Hankou, and was a participant at the CCP's 5th National Congress there from 27 April to 9 May. At the end of the Congress, Zhou was elected to the Party's Central Committee, again heading the military department. After Chiang Kai-shek's suppression of the Communists, the Nationalist Party split in two, with the Nationalist Party "left-wing" controlling the government in Hankou, and Chiang and the party "right-wing" establishing a rival government in Nanjing. Still following Comintern instructions, the Communists remained as a "bloc inside" the Nationalist Party, hoping to continue expanding their influence through the Nationalists, but further conflicts led the Nationalist "left-wing" to begin its own purge of the Communists in mid-July and Zhou had to go underground.

Pressured by their Comintern advisors, and themselves convinced that the "revolutionary high tide" had arrived, the Communists decided to launch a series of military revolts. The first of these was the Nanchang Revolt. Zhou was sent to oversee the event, but the moving figures seem to have been Tan Pingshan and Li Lisan, while the main military figures were Ye Ting and He Long. In military terms, the revolt was a disaster, with the Communists' forces decimated and scattered.

Activities during the Chinese Civil War

The underground era: Shanghai to Moscow

After the failure of the Nanchang Uprising, Zhou left China for the Soviet Union to attend the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) Sixth National Party Congress in Moscow, in June–July 1928. The Sixth Congress had to be held in Moscow because conditions in China were considered dangerous. During the Sixth Congress, Zhou was elected Director of the Central Committee Organization Department. His ally, Li Lisan, took over propaganda work. Zhou finally returned to China, after more than a year abroad, in 1929.

At the Sixth Congress in Moscow, Zhou had given figures indicating that, by 1928, fewer than 32,000 union members remained who were loyal to the Communists, and that only ten percent of Party members were proletarians. By 1929, only three percent of the Party were proletarians. In early 1930, Zhou began to disagree with the timing of Li Lisan's strategy of favoring rich peasants and concentrating military forces for attacks on urban centers. Zhou did not openly break with these more orthodox notions, and even tried to implement them later, in 1931, in Jiangxi.

The Jiangxi Soviet

Zhou moved to the Jiangxi base area and shook up the propaganda-oriented approach to revolution by demanding that the armed forces under Communist control actually be used to expand the base, rather than just to control and defend it. In December 1931, Zhou replaced Mao Zedong as Secretary of the 1st Front Army with Xiang Ying, and made himself political commissar of the Red Army, in place of Mao. Liu Bocheng, Lin Biao and Peng Dehuai all criticized Mao's tactics at the August 1932 Ningdu Conference.

In early 1933, Bo Gu arrived with the German Comintern adviser Otto Braun (Li De) and took control of party affairs. Zhou at this time, apparently with strong support from party and military colleagues, undertook to reorganize and standardize the Red Army. Under Zhou, Bo, and Braun, the Red Army defeated four attacks by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist troops. The military structure that led the Communists to victory was:

Leaders	Unit Designation
Lin Biao, Nie Rongzhen	1st Corps
Peng Dehuai, Yang Shangkun	3rd Corps
Xiao Jinguang	7th Corps
Xiao Ke	8th Corps
Luo Binghui	9th Corps
Fang Zhimin	10th Corps

Chiang's fifth campaign, launched in September 1933, was much more difficult to contain. Chiang's new use of "blockhouse tactics" and larger numbers of troops allowed his army to advance steadily into Communist territory, and they succeeded in seizing several major Communist strongholds. Bo Gu and Otto Braun adopted orthodox tactics to respond the Chiang, and Zhou, although personally opposed to them, directed these. Following their subsequent defeat, he and other military leaders were blamed.

Although Zhou's subsequently cautious military approach was distrusted by hardliners, he was again appointed to the position of vice chairman of the Military Commission. Zhou was accepted as leader largely because of his organizational talent and devotion to work, and because he had never shown any overt ambition to pursue supreme power within the Party. Within months, the continuing orthodox tactics of Bo and Braun led to a serious defeat for the Red Army, and forced the leaders of the CCP to seriously consider abandoning their bases in Jiangxi.

The Long March

After the decision to abandon Jiangxi was announced, Zhou was placed in charge of organizing and supervising the logistics of the Communist withdrawal. Making his plans in absolute secrecy and informing even senior leaders when and were they were to leave only at the last moment, Zhou's objective was to break through the enemy encirclement with as few casualties as possible, and before Chiang's forces were able to completely occupy all Communist bases. It is not known what criteria were used to determine who would stay and who would go, but 16,000 troops and some of the Communist's most notable commanders at the time (including Xiang Ying, Chen Yi, Tan Zhenlin, and Qu Qiubai) were left to form a rear guard to divert the main force of Nationalist troops from noticing the Communists' general withdrawal.

The withdrawal of 84,000 soldiers and civilians began in early October, 1934. Zhou's intelligence agents were successful in identifying a large section of Chiang's blockhouse lines that were manned by troops under General Chen Jitang, a Guangdong warlord who Zhou identified as being likely to prefer preserving the strength of his troops over fighting. Zhou sent Pan Hannian to negotiate for safe passage with General Chen, who subsequently allowed the Red Army to pass through the territory that he controlled without fighting.

After passing through three of the four blockhouse fortifications needed to escape Chiang's encirclement, the Red Army was finally intercepted by regular Nationalist troops, and suffered heavy casualties. Of the 86,000 Communists who attempted to break out of Jiangxi, only 36,000 successfully escaped. This loss demoralized some Communist leaders (particularly Bo Gu and Otto Braun), but Zhou remained calm and retained his command.

During the Communists' subsequent Long March, there were numerous high-level disputes over the direction that the Communists should take, and on the causes of the Red Army's defeats. During the power struggles that ensued, Zhou consistently backed Mao Zedong against the interests of Bo Gu and Otto Braun. Bo and Braun were later blamed for the Red Army's defeats, and were eventually removed from their positions of leadership. The Communists eventually succeeded in re-establishing a base in northern Shaanxi on October 20, 1935, arriving with only 8,000-9,000 remaining members.

The Xi'an Incident

Zhou Enlai (middle) and his wife Deng Yingchao with American journalist Edgar Snow, approx. 1938.

In December 1936, Chang Kai-shek flew to the Nationalist headquarters in Xi'an in order to test the loyalty of local KMT military forces under Marshal Zhang Xueliang, and to personally lead these forces in a final attack on Communist bases in Shaanxi, which Zhang had been ordered to destroy. Determined to force Chiang to direct China's forces against the Japanese (who had taken Zhang's territory of Manchuria and were preparing a broader invasion), on December 12 Zhang and his followers stormed Chiang's headquarters, killed most of his bodyguards, and seized the Generalissimo in what became known as the Xi'an Incident.

Reactions to Chiang's kidnapping in Yan'an were mixed. Some, including Mao Zedong and Zhu De, viewed it as an opportunity to have Chiang killed. Others, including Zhou Enlai and Zhang Wentian, saw it as an opportunity to achieve a united-front policy against the Japanese, which would strengthen the overall position of the CCP. Debate within Yan'an ended when a long telegram from Joseph Stalin arrived, urging the CCP to work towards Chiang's release, explaining that a united-front was the best position from which to resist the Japanese, and that only Chiang had the prestige and authority to carry out such a plan.

After initial communications with Zhang on the fate of Chiang, Zhou Enlai reached Xi'an on December 16, on a plane specifically sent for him by Zhang Xueliang, as the chief Communist negotiator. From then until Christmas Day, 1936, Zhou attempted to negotiate with Chiang and Zhang, proposing a national united-front government with Chiang as leader, a demarcation line between KMT and CPP territories, a national conference including a CCP delegation, and a series of future negotiations in Nanjing. Through days of intense negotiation, exercising extreme caution and courtesy, Zhou was largely successful in reconciling their positions.

On December 20, T.V. Soong arrived in Xi'an, and Soong Meiling arrived two days later, in order to negotiate Chiang's release. At first, Chiang was opposed to negotiating with a CCP delegate, but withdrew his opposition when it became clear that his life and freedom were largely dependent on Communist goodwill towards him. On December 24, Chiang received Zhou for a meeting, the first time that the two had seen each other since Zhou had left Whampoa over ten years earlier. Zhou began the conversation by saying: "In the ten years since we have met, you seem to have aged very little." Chiang nodded and said: "Enlai, you were my subordinate. You should do what I say." Zhou replied that, if Chiang would halt the civil war and resist the Japanese instead, the Red Army would willingly accept Chiang's command. By the end of this meeting, Chiang promised to end the civil war, to resist the Japanese together, and to invite Zhou to Nanjing for further talks.

On December 25, 1936, Zhang released Chiang and accompanied him to Nanjing. Subsequently, Zhang was court-martialed and sentenced to house arrest, and most of the officers who participated in the Xi'an Incident were executed. Although the KMT formally rejected collaboration with the CCP, Chiang ended active military activity against Communist bases in Yan'nan, implying that he had implicitly given his word to change the direction of his policies. Following the end of KMT attacks, the CCP was able to consolidate its territories and to prepare to resist the Japanese.

After news arrived that Zhang had been betrayed and arrested by Chiang, Zhang's old officer corps became very agitated, and some of them murdered a Nationalist general, Wang Yizhe, who was seen as largely responsible for the military's lack of response. While Zhou was still in Xi'an, he himself was surrounded in his office by a number of Zhang's officers, who accused the Communists of instigating the Xi'an Incident and of betraying Zhang by convincing the general to travel to Nanjing. At gunpoint, they threatened to kill Zhou. Zhou maintained his composure and eloquently defended his position. In the end, Zhou succeeded in calming the officers, and they departed, leaving him unharmed. In a series of negotiations with the KMT that lasted until June, 1937 (when the Marco Polo Bridge Incident occurred), Zhou attempted to gain Zhang's release, but failed.

Activities during World War II

Propaganda and intelligence in Wuhan

When the capital of Nanjing fell to the Japanese on December 13, 1937, Zhou accompanied the Nationalist government to its temporary capital of Wuhan. As the chief representative of the CCP in the nominal KMT-CCP cooperation agreement, Zhou established and headed the official KMT-CCP liaison office. While running the liaison office, Zhou established the Yangtze Bureau of the Central Committee. Under cover of its association with the Eighth Route Army, Zhou used the Yangtze Bureau to conduct clandestine operations within southern China, secretly recruiting Communist operatives and establishing Party structures throughout KMT-controlled areas.

In August, 1937, the CCP secretly issued orders to Zhou that his united front work was to focus on Communist infiltration and organization at all levels of the government and society. Zhou agreed to these orders, and applied his considerable organizational talents to completing them. Shortly after Zhou's arrival in Wuhan, he convinced the Nationalist government to approve and fund a Communist newspaper, Xinhua ribao ("New China Daily"), justifying it as a tool to spread anti-Japanese propaganda. This newspaper became a major tool for spreading Communist propaganda, and the Nationalists later viewed its approval and funding as one of their "biggest mistakes".

Zhou was successful in organizing large numbers of Chinese intellectuals and artists to promote resistance against the Japanese. The largest propaganda event that Zhou staged was a week-long celebration in 1938, following the successful defense of Tai'erzhuang. In this event, between 400,000-500,000 people took part in parades, and a chorus of over 10,000 people sung songs of resistance. Fundraising efforts during the week raised over a million yuan. Zhou himself donated 240 yuan, his monthly salary as deputy director of the Political Department.

While he was working in Wuhan, Zhou was the CCP's main contact person with the outside world, and worked hard to reverse the public perception of the Communists as a "bandit organization". Zhou established and maintained contacts with over forty foreign journalists and writers, including Edgar Snow, Agnes Smedley, Anna Louise Strong, and Rewi Alley, many of whom became sympathetic to the Communist cause and wrote about their sympathies in foreign publications. In sympathy with his efforts to promote the CCP to the outside world, Zhou arranged for a Canadian medical team, headed by Norman Bethune, to travel to Yan'an, and assisted the Dutch film director Rodney Evans in producing a documentary, 400 Million People.

Zhou was unsuccessful in averting the public defection of Zhang Guotao, one of the founders of the CCP, to the KMT. Zhang was prepared to defect due to a disagreement with Mao Zedong over the implementation of the united front policy, and because he resented Mao's authoritarian leadership style. Zhou, with the aid of Wang Ming, Bo Gu, and Li Kenong, intercepted Zhang after he arrived in Wuhan, and engaged in extensive negotiations through April, 1938, in order to convince Zhang not to defect, but these negotiations were unsuccessful. In the end, Zhang refused to compromise and placed himself under the protection of KMT secret police. On April 18, the CCP Central Committee expelled Zhang from the Party, and Zhang himself issued a statement accusing the CCP of sabotaging efforts to resist the Japanese. The entire episode was a serious setback for Zhou's attempts to improve the prestige of the Party.

Military strategy in Wuhan

In January 1938, the Nationalist government appointed Zhou as the deputy director to the Political Department of the Military Committee, working directly under General Cheng Cheng. As a senior Communist statesman holding the rank of lieutenant-general, Zhou was the only Communist to hold a high-level position within the Nationalist government. Zhou used his influence within the Military Committee to promote Nationalist generals that he believed were capable, and to promote cooperation with the Red Army.

In the Tai'erzhuang campaign, Zhou used his influence to ensure that the most capable Nationalist general available, Li Zongren be appointed overall commander, despite Chiang's reservations about Li's loyalty. When Chiang was hesitant to commit troops to the defense of Tai'erzhuang, Zhou convinced Chiang to do so by promising that the Communist Eighth Route Army would simultaneously attack the Japanese from the north, and that the New Fourth Army would sabotage the Tianjin-Pukou railroad, cutting off Japanese supplies. In the end, the defense of Tai'erzhuang was a major victory for the Nationalists, killing 20,000 Japanese soldiers and capturing a large amount of supplies and equipment.

Flight to Chongqing

When the Japanese army approached Wuhan in the fall of 1938, the Nationalists abandoned the city without a fight and withdrew farther inland, to Chongqing. While he was en route to Chongqing, Zhou was nearly killed in the "fire of Changsha", which lasted for three days, destroyed two thirds of the city, killed twenty thousand civilians, and left hundreds of thousands of people homeless. This fire was deliberately caused by the retreating Nationalist army in order to prevent the city from falling to the Japanese. Due to an organizational error (it was claimed), the fire was begun without any warning to the residents of the city.

After escaping from Changsha, Zhou took refuge in a Buddhist temple in a nearby village and organized the evacuation of the city. Zhou demanded that the causes of the fire be thoroughly investigated by authorities, that those responsible by punished, that reparations be given to the victims, that the city be thoroughly cleaned up, and that accommodations be provided for the homeless. In the end, the Nationalists blamed three local commanders for the fire and executed them. Newspapers across China blamed the fire on (non-KMT) arsonists, but the blaze contributed to a nation-wide loss of support for the KMT.

Early activities in Chongqing

Zhou Enlai reached Chongqing in December, 1938, and resumed the official and unofficial operations that he had been conducting in Wuhan in January, 1939. Zhou's activities included those required by his formal positions within the Nationalist government, his running of two pro-Communist newspapers, and his covert efforts to form reliable intelligence networks and increase the popularity and organization of CCP organizations in southern China. At its peak, the staff working under him in both official and covert roles totaled several hundred people.

Soon after arriving in Chongqing, Zhou successfully lobbied the Nationalist government to release Communist political prisoners. After their release, Zhou often assigned these former prisoners as agents to organize and lead Party organizations throughout southern China. The efforts of Zhou's covert activities were extremely successful, increasing CCP membership across southern China tenfold within months. Chiang was somewhat aware of these activities and introduced efforts to suppress them, but was generally unsuccessful.

While serving as the CCP ambassador in 1938, the childless Zhou met and befriended an orphan, Li Peng. Li was only seven when, in 1927, his father was killed by the Kuomintang. Zhou subsequently looked after him in Yan'an. After the war, Zhou systematically groomed Li for leadership and sent him to be educated in energy-related engineering in Moscow. Zhou's placement of Li within the powerful energy bureaucracy shielded Li from Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, and Li's eventual rise to the level of Premier surprised no one.

In July, 1939, while in Yan'an to attend a series of Politburo meetings, Zhou had an accident horseback riding in which he fell and fractured his right elbow. Because there was little medical care available in Yan'an, Zhou traveled to Moscow for medical treatment, using the occasion to brief the Comintern of the status of the united front. Zhou arrived in Moscow too late to mend the fracture, and his right arm remained bent for the rest of his life. Joseph Stalin was so displeased with the CCP's refusal to work more closely with the Nationalists that he refused to see Zhou during his stay.

Collapse of the United Front

By the time that Zhou returned to Chongqing in May, 1940, a serious rift had formed between the KMT and the CCP. Over the course of the next year, the relationship between the two parties degenerated into arrests and executions of Party members, covert attempts by agents of both sides to eliminate each other, propaganda efforts attacking each other, and major military clashes. The united front was officially abolished after the Anhui Incident in January, 1941, when 900,000 Communist soldiers of the New Fourth Army were ambushed, and their commanders either killed or imprisoned by government troops.

Zhou responded to the rift between the KMT and CCP by directing Party leaders to conduct their operations more secretly. He maintained propaganda efforts via the newspapers that he directed and kept in close contact with foreign journalists and ambassadors. Zhou increased and improved CCP intelligence efforts in southern China, and within the Nationalist army, recruiting, training, and organizing a large network of Communist spies.

Despite worsening relations with Chiang Kai-shek, Zhou operated openly in Chongqing, befriending Chinese and foreign visitors and staging public cultural activities, especially Chinese theater. Zhou cultivated a close personal friendship with General Feng Yuxiang, making it possible for Zhou to circulate freely among the officers of the Nationalist Army. Zhou befriended the General He Jifeng, and convinced He to secretly become a member of the CCP during an official visit to Yan'an. Zhou's intelligence agents penetrated the Sichuanese army of General Deng Xihou, resulting in Deng's secret agreement to supply ammunition to the Communist New Fourth Army. Zhou convinced another Sichuanese general, Li Wenhui, to covertly install a radio transmitter that facilitated secret communication between Yan'an and Chongqing. Zhou befriended Zhang Chong and Nong Yun, commanders in the Yunnan armed forces, who became secret CCP members, agreed to cooperate with the CCP against Chiang Kai-shek, and established a clandestine radio station that broadcast Communist propaganda from the provincial government building in Kunming.

Zhou remained the primary CCP representative to the outside world during his time in Chongqing. Zhou enjoyed receiving foreign visitors and reportedly made a favorable impression among American, British, Canadian, Russian, and other foreign diplomats, despite Chiang's attempts to isolate him from the international community. Zhou was variously described by visitors as being charming, urbane, hard-working, and living a very simple lifestyle. In 1941, Zhou received a visit from Ernest Hemingway and his wife, Martha. Martha later wrote that she and Ernest were extremely impressed with Zhou (and extremely unimpressed with Chiang), and they became convinced that the Communists would take over China after meeting him.

Relationship with Mao Zedong

In 1943, Zhou's relationship with Chiang Kai-shek deteriorated, and he returned permanently to Yan'an. By then, Mao Zedong had emerged as the most powerful leader of the CCP, and was attempting to have his political theories (literally "Mao Zedong Thought") accepted as the Party's dogma. Following his ascent to power, Mao organized a campaign (really a "brainwashing" or "hearts and minds" operation) to eliminate his political enemies and to indoctrinate the members of the CCP. This campaign became the foundation of the Maoist personality cult that later dominated Chinese politics until the end of the Cultural Revolution.

After returning to Yan'an, Zhou Enlai was strongly and excessively criticized in this campaign. Zhou was labelled, along with the generals Peng Dehuai, Liu Bocheng, Ye Jianying, and Nie Rongzhen, as an "empiricist" because he had a history of cooperating with the Comintern and with Mao's enemy, Wang Ming. Mao publicly attacked Zhou as "a collaborator and assistant of dogmatism... who belittled the study of Marxism-Lenninism". Mao's mania for political persecution led him and his allies to claim that the CCP organizations that Zhou had established in southern China were in fact led by KMT secret agents, a charge which Zhou firmly denied, and which was only withdrawn after Mao became convinced of Zhou's subservience in the latest period of the campaign.

Zhou defended himself by engaging in a long series of public reflections and self-criticisms, and he gave a number of speeches praising Mao and Mao Zedong Thought and giving his unconditional acceptance of Mao's leadership. He also joined Mao's allies in attacking Peng Shuzhi, Chen Duxiu, and Wang Ming, who Mao viewed as enemies. The persecution of Zhou Enlai distressed Moscow, and Georgi Dimitrov wrote a personal letter to Mao indicating the "Zhou Enlai... must not be severed from the Party." In the end, Zhou's enthusiastic acknowledgement of his own faults, his praise for Mao's leadership, and his attacks on Mao's enemies eventually convinced Mao that Zhou's conversion to Maoism was genuine, a precondition for Zhou's political survival. By the seventh congress of the CCP in 1945, Mao was acknowledged as the overall leader of the CCP, and the dogma of Mao Zedong Thought was firmly entrenched among the Party's leadership.

Diplomatic efforts with the United States

The Dixie mission

After the United States joined the war against Japan in 1941, American politicians and military advisors became increasingly interested in making contact with the Communists in order to coordinate attacks on the Japanese. In June 1944, Chiang Kai-shek agreed to allow an American military observation group, known as the "Dixie mission", to travel to Yan'an. Mao and Zhou welcomed this mission and held numerous talks in the interest of gaining access to American aid. They pledged support for any future American military actions on Chinese soil, and attempted to convince the Americans that the CCP was committed to a united KMT-CCP government. In a gesture of goodwill, People's Liberation Army (PLA) guerrilla units were instructed to rescue Allied soldiers held prisoner in China (who were mostly American airmen). By the time that the Americans left Yan'an, many had become convinced that the CCP was "a party seeking orderly democratic growth towards socialism", and the mission formally suggested greater cooperation between the CCP and the American military.

1944-1945

In 1944, Zhou wrote to General Joseph Stillwell, the American commander of the China Burma India war theater, attempting to convince Stillwell of the need for the Americans to supply the Communists, and of the Communist's desire for a united Chinese government after the war. Stillwell's open disenchantment with the Nationalist government in general, and with Chiang Kai-shek specifically, motivated President Franklin D. Roosevelt to remove him that same year, before Zhou's diplomacy could be effective. Stillwell's replacement, Patrick J. Hurley, was receptive to Zhou's appeals, but ultimately refused to align the American military with the CCP unless the Party made concessions to the KMT, which Mao and Zhou found unacceptable. Soon after Japan surrendered in 1945, Chiang invited Mao and Zhou to Chongqing to take part in an American-endorsed peace conference.

The Chongqing negotiations

There was widespread apprehension in Yan'an that the invitation from Chiang was a trap, and that the Nationalists were planning to assassinate or imprison the two instead. Zhou took control over Mao's security detail, and his subsequent inspections of their plane and lodgings found nothing. Throughout the trip to Chongqing, Mao refused to enter his accommodations until they had been personally inspected by Zhou. Mao and Zhou traveled together to receptions, banquets, and other public gatherings, and Zhou introduced him to numerous local celebrities and statesmen that he had befriended during his earlier stay in Chongqing.

During the forty-three days of negotiations, Mao and Chiang met eleven times to discuss the conditions of post-war China, while Zhou worked on confirming the details of the negotiations. In the end, the negotiations resolved nothing. Zhou's offer to withdraw the Red Army from southern China was ignored, and P.J. Hurley's ultimatum to incorporate the CCP into the KMT insulted Mao. After Mao returned to Yan'an on October 10, 1945, Zhou stayed behind to sort out the details of the conference's resolution. Zhou returned to Yan'an on November 27, 1945, when major skirmishes between the Communists and Nationalists made future negotiations pointless. Hurley himself subsequently announced his resignation, accusing members of the US embassy of undermining him and favoring the Communists.

Following the failure of the Chongqing negotiations, the Chinese Civil War resumed. After the Communist victory in 1949, the People's Republic of China (PRC) was founded.

PRC diplomat and statesman

Diplomatic situation of the PRC in 1949

By the early 1950s, China's international influence was extremely low. By the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, China's pretentions of universalism had been shattered by a string of military defeats and incursions by Europeans and Japanese. By the end of Yuan Shikai's reign and the subsequent Warlord Era, China's international prestige had declined to "almost nothing". In World War II, China's effective role was sometimes questioned by other Allied leaders. The 1950–1953 Korean War greatly exacerbated China's international position by fixing the United States in a position of animosity, ensuring that Taiwan would remain outside of PRC control and that the PRC would remain outside of the United Nations for the foreseeable future.

In 1949, with the establishment of the People's Republic of China, Zhou was appointed both Premier of the Government Administration Council (later replaced by the State Council) and Minister of Foreign Affairs. Through the coordination of these two offices and his position as a member of the five-man standing committee of the Politburo, Zhou became the architect of early PRC foreign policy, presenting China as a new, yet responsible member of the international community. By the early 1950s, Zhou was an experienced negotiator and was respected as a senior revolutionary within China.

Diplomacy with India

Zhou's first diplomatic successes came as the result of successfully pursuing a warm relationship, based on mutual respect, with India's first post-independence prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Through his diplomacy, Zhou managed to persuade India to accept China's occupation of Tibet in 1950 and 1951. India was later persuaded to act as a neutral mediator between China and the United States during the many difficult phases of the negotiations settling the Korean War.

Diplomacy with China's communist neighbors

After Stalin died in 1953, Zhou left for Moscow and attended Stalin's funeral. Mao, curiously, decided not to travel to Moscow, possibly because no senior Soviet politician had yet travelled to Beijing, or because Stalin had rejected an offer to meet with Mao in 1948. While in Moscow, Zhou was notably received with considerable respect by Soviet officials, being permitted to stand with the USSR's new leaders (Nikita Khrushchev, Georgi Malenkov, and Lavrenti Beria), instead of with the other "foreign" dignitaries who attended. With these three leaders, Zhou walked directly behind the gun carriage bearing Stalin's coffin. Zhou's diplomatic efforts on his travel to Moscow were rewarded shortly after when, in 1954, Khrushchev himself visited Beijing to take part in the fifth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic.

Throughout the 1950s, Zhou worked to tighten economic and political relations between China and other Communist states, coordinating China's foreign policy with Soviet policies promoting solidarity among political allies. In 1952, Zhou signed an economic and cultural agreement with the Mongolian People's Republic, giving de facto recognition of the independence of what had been known as "Outer Mongolia" in Qing times. Zhou also worked to conclude an agreement with Kim Il Sung in order to help the postwar reconstruction of North Korea's economy. Pursuing the goals of peaceful diplomacy with China's neighbors, Zhou held amicable talks with Burma's prime minister, U Nu, and promoted China's efforts to send supplies to Ho Chi Minh's Vietnamese rebels.

The Geneva Conference

In April 1954, Zhou attended the Geneva Conference, convened to settle the ongoing Franco-Vietnamese War. His patience and shrewdness were credited with assisting the major powers involved (the Soviets, French, Americans, and North Vietnamese) to iron out the agreement ending the conflict. According to the negotiated peace, French Indochina was to be partitioned into Laos, Cambodia, North Vietnam, and South Vietnam. Elections were agreed to be called within two years to create a coalition government in a united Vietnam, and the Vietminh agreed to end their guerilla activities in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia

During one early meeting in Geneva, Zhou found himself in the same room with the staunchly anti-Communist American secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. After Zhou offered his hand, Dulles rudely turned his back and walked out of the room, saying "I cannot". Zhou was interpreted by onlookers as turning this moment of possible humiliation into a small victory by giving only a small, "Gallic-style" shrug to this behaviour. Zhou was equally effective in countering Dulles' insistence that China not be given a seat at the sessions. Furthering the impression of Chinese urbanity and civility, he had lunch with Charlie Chaplin, who had been living in Switzerland since being blacklisted in the United States for his radical politics.

The Bandung conference

In 1955, Zhou was a prominent participator in the Bandung conference held in Indonesia. The Bandung conference was a meeting of twenty-nine African and Asian states, organized by Indonesia, Burma, Pakistan, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and India, and was called largely to promote Afro-Asian economic and cultural cooperation and to oppose colonialism or neocolonialism by either the United States or the Soviet Union in the Cold War. At the conference, Zhou skillfully gave the conference a neutral stance that made the United States appear as a serious threat to the peace and stability of the region. Zhou complained that, while China was working towards "world peace and the progress of mankind", "aggressive circles" within the United states were actively aiding the Nationalists in Taiwan and planning to rearm the Japanese. He was widely quoted for his remark that "the population of Asia will never forget that the first atom bomb was exploded on Asian soil." With the support of its most prestigious participants, the conference produced a strong declaration in favour of peace, the abolition of nuclear arms, genearal arms reduction, and the principle of universal representation at the United Nations.

On his way to the Bandung conference, an assassination attempt was made against Zhou when a bomb was planted on the Air India plane Kashmir Princess, chartered for Zhou's trip from Hong Kong to Jakarta. Zhou avoided the attempt when he changed planes at the last minute, but all 11 of the flight's other passengers were killed. A recent study has blamed the attempt on "one of the intelligence agencies of the KMT." Journalist Joseph Trento has also alleged that there was a second attempt on Zhou's life at the Bandung conference involving "a bowl of rice poisoned with a slow-acting toxin."

Zhou found out about the bomb on the Kashmir Princess after being warned of the plot by his own intelligence officers. He did not attempt to stop it because he viewed those that died as disposable: low-level cadres and international journalists. After the crash, Zhou used the incident to warn the British about the KMT intelligence operatives active in Hong Kong, and pressured Great Britain to disable the Nationalist intelligence network operating there (with the support of his own). He hoped that the incident would improve Britain's relationship with the PRC, and damage Britain's relationship with the ROC.

After the Bandung conference, China's international political situation began to gradually improve. With the help of many of the nonaligned powers who had taken part in the conference, the US-backed position economically and politically boycotting the PRC began to erode, despite continuing American pressure to follow its direction. In 1971, the United States finally gave up its opposition, and the PRC gained China's seat within the United Nations.

Position on the ROC

Zhou emerged from the Bandung conference with a reputation as a flexible and open-minded negotiator. Recognizing that the United States would back the de facto independence of ROC-controlled Taiwan with military force, Zhou persuaded his government to end the shelling of Kinmen and Matsu, and to search for a diplomatic alternative to the confrontation instead. In a formal announcement in May, 1955, Zhou declared that the PRC would "strive for the liberation of Taiwan by peaceful means so far as it is possible." Whenever the question of Taiwan was raised with foreign statesmen, Zhou argued that Taiwan was part of China, and that the resolution of the conflict with the ROC was an internal matter.

In 1958 the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs was passed to Chen Yi, a general with little prior diplomatic experience.

The Shanghai communique

Zhou, shown here with Henry Kissinger and Mao Zedong.

Zhou shakes hands with President Richard Nixon upon Nixon's arrival to China in February 1972.

By the early 1970s, Sino-American relations had begun to improve. Mao's workers in the petrolium industry, one of China's few growing economic sectors at the time, advised the Chairman that, in order to consider growth at levels desired by the Party's leadership, large imports of American technology and technical expertise were essential. In January, 1970, the Chinese invited the American ping-pong team to tour China, initiating an era of "ping-pong diplomacy".

In 1971, Zhou Enlai met secretly with President Nixon's security advisor, Henry Kissinger, who had flown to China to prepare for a meeting between Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong. During the course of these meetings, the United States agreed to allow the transfer of American money to China (presumably from relatives in the United States), to allow American-owned ships to conduct trade with China (under foreign flags), and to allow Chinese exports into the United States for the first time since the Korean War. At the time, these negotiations were considered so sensitive that they were concealed from the American public, the State Department, the American secretary of state, and all foreign governments.

On the morning of February 21, 1972, Richard Nixon arrived in Beijing, where he was greeted by Zhou, and later met with Mao Zedong. The diplomatic substance of Nixon's visit was resolved on February 28, in the Shanghai Communique, which summarized both sides' positions without attempting to resolve them. The "US side" reaffirmed the American position that America's involvement in the ongoing Vietnam War did not constitute "outside intervention" in Vietnam's affairs, and restated its commitment to "individual freedom", and pledged continued support for South Korea. The "Chinese Side" stated that "wherever there is oppression, there is resistance", that "all foreign troops should be withdrawn to their own countries", and that Korea should be unified according to the demands of North Korea. Both sides agreed to disagree on the status of Taiwan.The closing sections of the Shanghai Communique encouraged further diplomatic, cultural, economic, journalistic, and scientific exchanges, and endorsed both sides' intentions to work towards "the relaxation of tensions in Asia and the world." The resolutions of the Shanghai Communique represented a major policy shift for both the United States and China.

The Great Leap Forward

In 1958, Mao Zedong began the Great Leap Forward, aimed at increasing China's production levels in industry and agriculture with unrealistic targets. As a popular and practical administrator, Zhou maintained his position through the Leap. Zhou has been described by at least one historian as the "midwife" of the Great Leap Forward, turning Mao's theory into reality and in the process causing a "minimum of 45 million" deaths.

By the early 1960s, Mao's prestige was been as high as it had once been. Mao's economic policies in the 1950s had failed, and he had developed a lifestyle that was increasingly out of touch with many of his oldest colleagues. Among the activities that seemed contrary to his popular image were the swims in his private pool in Zhongnanhai, his many villas around China that he would travel to on a private train, his private, book-lined study, and the companionship of an ever-changing succession of enthusiastic young women whom he met either on weekly dances in Zhongnanhai or on his journeys by train. The combination of his personal eccentricities and public policy failures produced criticism from such veteran revolutionaries as Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun, and Zhou Enlai, who seemed less and less to share an enthusiasm for his presence or his vision of continuous revolutionary struggle.

The Cultural Revolution

Initial Efforts of Mao and Lin

To improve his image and power, Mao, with the help of Lin Biao, undertook a number of public propaganda efforts. Among the efforts of Mao and Lin to improve Mao's image in the early 1960s were Lin's forging of the Diary of Lei Feng and his compilation of Quotations from Chairman Mao. The last and most successful of these efforts was the Cultural Revolution.

Whatever its other causes, the Cultural Revolution, declared in 1966, was overtly pro-Maoist, and gave Mao the power and influence to purge the Party of his political enemies at the highest levels of government. Along with closing China's schools and universities, its exhortations of young Chinese to randomly destroy old buildings, temples, and art, and to attack their teachers, shool administrators, party leaders, and parents, the Cultural Revolution also increased Mao's prestige so much that entire villiages adopted the practice of offering prayers to Mao before every meal. In both national politics and Chinese popular culture, Mao established himself as a demigod accountable to no one, purging any that he suspected of opposing him. After the Cultural Revolution was announced, many of the most senior members of the CPP who had shared Zhou's hesitation in following Mao's direction, including Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, were removed from their posts almost immediately; and, with their families, subjected to mass criticism and humiliation.

Political survival

Soon after they had been removed, Zhou argued that Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping "should be allowed to come back to work", but this was opposed by Mao, Lin Biao, Kang Sheng and Chen Boda. Chen Boda even suggested that Zhou himself might be "considered counter-revolutionary", if he did not toe the Maoist line. Following the threats that he would share in the fate of his comrades if he did not support Mao, Zhou ceased his criticisms and began to work more closely with the Chairman and his clique.

Zhou gave his backing to the establishment of radical Red Guard organizations in October, 1966, and joined Chen Boda and Jiang Qing against what they considered "leftist" and "rightist" Red Guard factions. This opened the way for attacks on Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and Tao Zhu in December 1966— January 1967. By September, 1968, Zhou candidly described his strategy for political survival to Japanese LDP parliamentarians visiting Beijing: "one’s personal opinions should advance or beat a retreat according to the direction of the majority." When he was accused of being less than enthusiastic in following Mao's leadership, he accused himself of "poor understanding" of Mao's theories, giving the appearance of compromising with forces that he secretly loathed and referred to in private as his "inferno". Following the logic of political survival, Zhou worked to aid Mao, and restricted his criticisms to private conversations.

Throughout the next decade, Mao largely developed policies while Zhou carried them out, attempting to moderate some of the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Despite his best efforts, the inability to prevent many of the events of the Cultural Revolution were a great blow to Zhou. Over the last decade of his life, Zhou's ability to implement Mao's policies and keep the nation afloat during periods of adversity was so great that his practical importance alone was sufficient to save him (with Mao's assistance) whenever Zhou became politically threatened. At the latest stages of the Cultural revolution, in 1975, Zhou pushed for the "Four Modernizations" in order to undo the damage caused by the Mao's policies.

During the later stages of the Cultural Revolution, Zhou became a target of political campaigns orchestrated by Chairman Mao and the Gang of Four. The "Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius" campaign of 1973 and 1974 was directed at Premier Zhou because he was viewed as one of the Gang's primary political opponents. In 1975, Zhou's enemies initiated a campaign named "Criticizing Song Jiang, Evaluating the Water Margin", which encouraged the use of Zhou as an example of a political loser.

Tensions with Mao

By the end of Zhou's life, there were many signs that the long relationship between Zhou and Mao had become very poor. To many observers' surprise, Mao did not visit Zhou in his last months, and did not issue any personal message affirming Zhou's achievements or contributions to the revolution upon his death. Mao did not send any condolences to Zhou's widow, who was herself a significant and lifelong contributor to the revolution and to the CCP. Mao also did not attend any of the imposing funeral services held in the Great Hall of the People the following week.

Mao famously attacked a proposal to have Zhou publicly declared a great Marxist, reflecting the bitterness that he had felt whenever Zhou had gained influence over others. When forty Chinese marshals and generals proposed that Mao make a brief appearance at Zhou's funeral the Chairman refused, instructing his nephew, Mao Yuanxin, to explain to the Chinese Politburo that Mao could not attend because doing so would be seen as a public admission that he was being forced to "rethink the Cultural Revolution", which Zhou had privately opposed. Mao worried that public expressions of mourning would later be directed against him and his policies, and backed the "five nos" campaign to suppress public expressions of mourning for Zhou after the late Premier's death.

Official explanations for Mao's failure to recognize Zhou's achievements have focused on a supposed illness of Mao, although Mao was not too ill to receive the president of Sao Tome and Principe two weeks before Zhou's death, or to receive Richard Nixon several months before. Perhaps reflecting the public perception of the rift between Mao and Zhou, there were rumors that Mao had denied Zhou cancer treatment and had ordered fireworks to be set off in Beijing to celebrate Zhou's death, but these rumors cannot be confirmed.

Death and reactions

Illness and death

After discovering that he had bladder cancer, Zhou began to pass many of his responsibilities on to Deng Xiaoping. Zhou was hospitalized in 1974, but continued to conduct work from the hospital, with Deng Xiaoping, as the First Deputy Premier, handling most of the important State Council matters. Zhou died on the morning of 8 January 1976, aged 77, eight months before Mao Zedong. Zhou's death brought messages of condolences from many non-aligned states that he had affected during his tenure as an effective diplomat and negotiator on the world stage, and many states expressed that his death was a terrible loss. Zhou's body was cremated and the ashes scattered by air over hills and valleys, according to his wishes.

Memorial

Whatever Mao's attitudes may have been, the rest of the nation was plunged into mourning. Beijing was described by foreign correspondents, shortly after Zhou's death, as looking like a ghost town. The news that Zhou had willed his ashes to be scattered across the hills and rivers of his hometown, rather than stored in a ceremonial mausoleum, was met with deep emotion by the public. With Zhou gone, it became clear how many people had revered him, and how they had viewed him as a symbol of stability in an otherwise chaotic period of history.

Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping gave the eulogy at Zhou's state funeral on January 15, 1976. Although much of his speech echoed the wording of an official statement by the Central Committee immediataly following Zhou's death or consisted of a meticulous description of Zhou's remarkable political career, near the end of the eulogy he offered a personal tribute to Zhou's character, speaking from the heart while observing the rhetoric demanded of ceremonial state occasions. Referring to Zhou, Deng stated that:

He was open and aboveboard, paid attention to the interests of the whole, observed Party discipline, was strict in "dissecting" himself and good at uniting the mass of cadres, and upheld the unity and solidarity of the Party. He maintained broad and close ties with the masses and showed boundless warmheartedness towards all comrades and the people.... We should learn from his fine style - being modest and prudent, unassuming and approachable, setting an example by his conduct, and living in a plain and hard-working way. We should follow his example of adhering to the proletarian style and opposing the bourgeois style of life

This passage has been interpreted as a subtle criticism of Mao and the other leaders of the Cultural Revolution, who could not possibly be viewed or praised as being "open and aboveboard", "good at uniting the mass of cadres", for displaying "warmheartedness", or for modesty, prudence, or approachability. Regardless of Deng's intentions, the Gang of Four, and later Hua Guofeng, increased the persecution of Deng shortly after he delivered this eulogy.

Suppression of public mourning

After Zhou's single official memorial ceremony on January 15, Zhou's political enemies within the Party officially prohibited any further displays of public mourning. The most notorious regulations prohibiting Zhou from being honoured were the poorly observed and poorly enforced "five nos": no wearing black armbands, no mourning wreaths, no mourning halls, no memorial activities, and no handing out photos of Zhou. Years of resentment over the Cultural Revolution, the public persecution of Deng Xiaoping (who was strongly associated with Zhou in public perception), and the prohibition against publicly mourning Zhou became associated with each other shortly after Zhou's death, leading to popular discontent against Mao and his apparent successors (notably Hua Guofeng and the Gang of Four).

Official attempts to enforce the "five nos" included removing public memorials and tearing down posters commemorating his achievements. On March 25, 1976, a leading Shanghai newspaper, Wenhui Bao, published an article stating that Zhou was "the capitalist roader inside the Party [who] wanted to help the unrepentant capitalist roader [Deng] regain his power". This and other propaganda efforts to attack Zhou's image only strengthened the public's attachment to Zhou's memory. Between March and April, 1976, a forged document circulated in Nanjing that claimed itself to be Zhou Enlai's last will. It attacked Jiang Qing and praised Deng Xiaoping, and was met with increased propaganda efforts by the government.

The Tiananmen incident

Within several months after the death of Zhou, one of the most extraordinary spontaneous events in the history of the PRC occurred. On April 4, 1976, at the eve of China's annual Qingming Festival, in which Chinese traditionally pay homage to their deceased ancestors, thousands of people gathered around the Monument to the People's Heroes in Tiananmen Square to commemorate the life and death of Zhou Enlai. On this occasion, the people of Beijing honoured Zhou by laying wreaths, banners, poems, placards, and flowers at the foot of the Monument. The most obvious purpose of this memorial was to eulogize Zhou, but Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan were also attacked for their alleged evil actions against the Premier. A small number of slogans left at Tiananmen even attacked Mao himeself, and his Cultural Revolution.

Up to two million people may have visited Tiananmen Square on April 4. First-hand observations of the events in Tiananment Square on April 4 report that all levels of society, from the poorest peasants to high-ranking PLA officers and the children of high-ranking cadres, were represented in the activities. Those who participated were motivated by a mixture of anger over the treatment of Zhou, revolt against Mao and his policies, apprehension for China's future, and defiance of those who would seek to punish the public for commemorating Zhou's memory. There is nothing to suggest that events were coordinated from any position of leadership: it was a spontaneous demonstration reflecting widespread public sentiment. Deng Xiaoping was notably absent, and he instructed his children to avoid being seen at the square.

On the morning of April 5, crowds gathering around the memorial arrived to discover that it had been completely removed by the police during the night, angering them. Attempts to suppress the morners led to a violent riot, in which police cars were set on fire and a crowd of over 100,000 people forced its way into several government buildings surrounding the square.

By 6:00 pm, most of the crowd had dispersed, but a small group remained until 10:00 pm, when a security force entered Tiananmen Square and arrested them. (The reported figure of those arrested was 388 people, but was rumored to be far higher.) Many of those arrested were later sentenced to "people's trial" at Peking University, or were sentenced to prison work camps. Incidents similar to those which occurred in Beijing on April 4 and 5 occurred in Zhengzhou, Kunming, Taiyuan, Changchun, Shanghai, Wuhan, and Guangzhou. Possibly because of his close association with Zhou, Deng Xiaoping was formally stripped of all positions "inside and outside the Party" on April 7, following this "Tiananmen Incident".

After ousting Hua Guofeng and assuming control of China in 1980, Deng Xiaoping released those arrested in the Tiananmen Incident as part of a broader effort to reverse the effects of the Cultural Revolution.

Legacy

Praise

By the end of his lifetime, Zhou was widely viewed as representing moderation and justice in Chinese popular culture. Since his death, Zhou Enlai has been regarded as a skilled negotiator, a master of policy implementation, a devoted revolutionary, and a pragmatic statesman with an unusual attentiveness to detail and nuance. He was also known for his tireless and dedicated work ethic, and his unusual charm and poise in public. He was reputedly the last Mandarin bureaucrat in the Confucian tradition. Zhou's political behaviour should be viewed in light of his political philosophy as well as his personality. To a large extent, Zhou epitomized the paradox inherent in a Communist politician with traditional Chinese upbringing: at once conservative and radical, pragmatic and ideological, possessed by a belief in order and harmony as well as a faith, which he developed very gradually over time, in the progressive power of rebellion and revolution.

Though a firm believer in the Communist ideal on which the People's Republic was founded, Zhou is widely believed to have moderated the excesses of Mao's radical policies within the limits of his power. It has been assumed that he protected imperial and religious sites of cultural significance (such as the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet) from the Tibetan Red Guards, and shielded many top-level leaders, including Deng Xiaoping, as well as many academics and artists from purges.

While many earlier Chinese leaders today have been subjected to criticism inside China, Zhou's image has remained positive among contemporary Chinese. Many Chinese continue to venerate Zhou as possibly the most humane leader of the twentieth century, and the CCP today promotes Zhou as a dedicated and self-sacrificing leader who remains a symbol of the Communist Party. Even historians who list Mao's faults generally attribute the opposite qualities to Zhou: Zhou was cultured where Mao was crude; consistent where Mao was unstable; stoic where Mao was paranoid.

The American statesmen who met Zhou in 1971 later wrote that they were deeply affected by his qualities. In 1979, Henry Kissinger wrote that he had been extremely impressed with Zhou's intelligence and character, describing him as "equally at home in philosophy, reminiscence, historical analysis, tactical probes, humorous repartee... [and] could display an extraordinary personal graciousness." Kissinger called Zhou "one of the two or three most impressive men I have ever met," stating that "his commands of facts, in particular his knowledge of American events and, for that matter, of my own background, was stunning", despite Kissinger's dislike of the Communist ideology that Zhou represented. Richard Nixon, in his own memoirs, stated that he was impressed with Zhou's exceptional "brilliance and dynamism".

Zhou remains a widely commemorated figure in China today. The city of Tianjin has established a museum to Zhou and his wife, and the city of Nanjing has erected a memorial commemorating Communist negotiations in 1946 with the Nationalist government which features a bronze statue of Zhou. Stamps commemorating the first anniversary of Zhou's death were issued in 1977, and in 1998 to commemorate his 100th birthday.

Criticism

Recent academic criticism of Zhou has focused on his late relationship with Mao, and his political activities during the Cultural Revolution, arguing that the relationship between Zhou and Mao may have been more complex than is commonly portrayed. Zhou has been depicted as unconditionally submissive and loyal to Mao and his allies, going out of his way to support or permit the persecution of friends and relatives in order to avoid facing political condemnation himself. After the founding of the PRC, Zhou was unable or unwilling to protect the former spies that he had employed in the Chinese Civil War and the Second World War, who were persecuted for their wartime contacts with the enemies of the CCP. Early in the Cultural Revolution, he told Jiang Qing "From now on you make all the decisions, and I'll make sure they're carried out," and publicly declared that his old colleague, Liu Shaoqi, "deserved to die" for opposing Mao. In the effort to avoid being persecuted for opposing Mao, Zhou passively accepted the political persecution of many others, including his own brother.

Zhou's involvement in the Cultural Revolution is defended on the grounds that he had no other choice, other than political martyrdom. Zhou's influence and political ability was such that, without his cooperation, the entire government, which Zhou had spent his entire life building, may have collapsed. Given the political circumstances of the last decade of Zhou's life, it is unlikely that he could have survived being purged without cultivating the support of Mao through active assistance.

A popular saying within China once compared Zhou to a budaoweng (a doll that stands upright after being knocked down), implying that he was a political opportunist. Some observers have criticized him as being too diplomatic: avoiding clear stands in complex political situations and instead becoming ideologically elusive, ambiguous, and enigmatic.

After coming to power, Deng Xiaoping may have overemphasized Zhou Enlai's achievements to distance the Communist Party from Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, both of which had seriously weakened the Party's prestige. Deng observed that Mao's disastrous policies could no longer represent the Party's finest hour, but that the legacy and character of Zhou Enlai could. By actively associating itself with an already popular Zhou Enlai, Zhou's legacy may have been used (and possibly distorted) as a political tool of the Party after his death.

See also

• History of the People's Republic of China
• Republic of China
• Chinese Civil War
• Second Sino-Japanese War
• Chiang Kai-shek
• Kuomintang
• Whampoa Military Academy
• Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary by Gao Wenqian
• Long March
• Mao Zedong
• Xian Incident
• Bandung Conference
• Geneva Conference
• Shanghai Communique
• Great Leap Forward
• Cultural Revolution
• Tiananmen Incident

References

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• Gao Wenqian. Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary. NY: Public Affairs, 2007.
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• Weidenbaum, Rhoda S. "Chou En-Lai, Creative Revolutionary." Ph.D. diss. University of Connecticut, 1981.
• Whitson, William W. and Huang, Chen-hsia. The Chinese High Command: A History of Communist Military Politics, 1927–71. New York: Praeger, 1973.
• Wilbur, C. Martin. The Nationalist Revolution in China: 1923–1928. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
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External links

• Zhou Enlai Biography From Spartacus Educational
• Zhou Enlai, Stephan Landserger's Chinese Propaganda Pages [1]
• The Mystery of Zhou Enlai by Jonathan Spence from The New York Review of Books